A church in Jacksonville, Florida is coming under fire for its controversial decision to ban children from its church services. According to a local Jacksonville news affiliate, Christ Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church has banned children from attending Sunday services because their new pastor, Darrell Gilyard, is a registered sex offender and cannot have contact with children.

DETROIT, MI– A fight over a seat at a baby shower triggered the killing of a 9-month-old boy, according to the victim’s grandmother. Delric Miller IV died Monday as he slept on the couch in his home on the 8400 block of Greenview Avenue. Police said someone fired at the house with an AK-47-type assault rifle about 4:30 a.m., leaving behind 37 shells. One of the rounds hit the baby, who was pronounced dead at Sinai-Grace Hospital.

Sex offender charged with child abuse–Horry County police charged a Conway man in a child abuse investigation launched Thursday. Employees at a county middle school that police did not name made a report after they learned from students about a possible child abuse incident, according to a press release.

Every five hours a child dies from abuse or neglect in the US. The latest government figures show an estimated 1,770 children were killed as a result of maltreatment in 2009. A recent congressional report concludes the real number could be nearer 2,500. In fact, America has the worst child abuse record in the industrialized world. Why? The BBC’s Natalia Antelava investigates.

A Roman Catholic church official accused of keeping predator priests in ministry and transferring them from parish to parish has requested the case against him dismissed after new evidence shows his list of priests had been destroyed. Facing trial, Monsignor William Lynn created the list of problem priests in 1994, but Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua had it destroyed, according to a defense memo filed Friday. Lynn wants his child endangerment case dismissed because of new evidence turned over by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia which includes one surviving list of the 35 accused priests.

A man who killed his autistic son told his children that people were coming to ‘cut them up and eat them’ before the deadly attack. William De Jesus stabbed himself and the rest of his family hours after breaking in to an elderly man’s motor home and shooting him dead. His wife has now been forbidden from seeing the couple’s surviving seven-year-old son after admitting she helped De Jesus sexually abuse the boy and his brother. The children were taken in to the care of the state in 2008 after the abuse allegations were first aired by their mother, but were returned to their parents two years later when she retracted her claims.

Deliver Us from Evil (2006) is a documentary film directed by Amy J. Berg which tells the true story of Catholic priest Oliver O’Grady, who sexually abused potentially hundreds of children between the late 1970s and early 1990s. The film won the Best Documentary Award at the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The title refers to a line in the Lord’s Prayer, or the “Our Father.

On February 15, 1996, Lynn Owen Cozart was found guilty of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, endangering the welfare of children, and three counts of indecent assault in the Beaver County Court of Common Pleas, Beaver County, Pennsylvania. These charges stemmed from the discovery that Cozart had molested his three juvenile children from 1984 through 1994. Cozart failed to appear for his sentencing on April 8, 1996, and has been a fugitive since that time. A federal arrest warrant charging Cozart with unlawful flight to avoid confinement was issued in the Western District of Pennsylvania on March 22, 2002.

Step-mothers can be nasty. Step-fathers brutal. Kailash Yati branded three-year-old Sanyam with cigarettes and tongs, bit the boy’s private parts, shoved a chapatti roller up his rectum, broke his teeth with a screwdriver, thrashed and starved him just because he is his step-son. The police arrested him on Friday from Sayla village in Rajasthan’s Jalore district. He has been charged with attempt to murder.

A Queens school employee has been charged with sexually abusing six 9 and 10-year-old schoolgirls, becoming the fifth school worker in New York to be arrested for sexual crimes in recent weeks. Brett Picou, 30, of Public School 52 in Springfield Gardens, is accused of spanking one of the girls, grabbing the children’s buttocks as they walked up stairs and fondling their buttocks over their clothing when he hugged them.

Roy Ralph Estrada, a former member of Frank Zappa’s group the Mothers of Invention and original member of Little Feat, will serve 25 years in prison on child molestation charges. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Estrada, 68, abused a female family member in Tarrant County after being released from a California prison for another child abuse case. “The victim’s family was unaware that he was a convicted sex offender,” Tarrant County district attorney office spokesperson Melody McDonald said. “Estrada was sentenced to 25 years in a plea bargain agreement and is not eligible for parole.”

Henry County, Indiana – Shirley Hagerman, a 56-year-old Henry County woman was jailed after she allegedly burned her grandchildrens’ tongues with a heater. According to the Henry County Sheriff’s Office, an investigation was launched after two boys, ages 3 and 6, received severe burns on their tongues after visiting their grandmother’s residence.

Hendersonville, NC – Deborah Tipton, a 44-year-old special education teacher at Mountain Community School was jailed after she allegedly video-taped a 12-year-old girl’s genitals and then sent the video to another teacher who has also been arrested. According to police, Tipton filmed the genitals of a 12-year-old girl and then sent the video to 41-year-old Chadwick Hamby.

The videotape appalled juror Kelly Hurley. A man with a belt draped around his neck was shown berating a 7-year-old boy, shaving his eyebrows and head as punishment and forcing him to do calisthenics. At one point, a slapping sound and the wailing of a child could be heard off camera. The man, Devery Broox, was found not guilty this week of child abuse. Hurley concurred with the verdict, which was based on the legal definition of the crime — but she’s conflicted.